We’re here in the fourth period Journalism class getting an introduction to updating a website by using this photo from the 34th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Breakfast at the Palm Beach County Convention Center on Monday. Go ‘Canes!

We’re here in the third period Journalism class updating this site with info from the 34th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Breakfast. Three Inlet Grove Community High School students won honorable mention awards in the MLK Essay Contest, including Breanna Moore, a senior student in the Medical Academy, pictured below with fellow Inlet Grove students.

Just finished a great year with my Journalism students at Inlet Grove Community High School, plus two before that as managing editor of the South Florida Times. Now summer’s back again, I’m missing my students and the newsroom — so what better to do than pause and give thanks for all the good. It’s also a good time to catch up on missed family and friends, obligations and opportunities, community service and activities. To get in some biking and swimming. And of course, with so much going on — from the regrettable (Iraq. Again.) to the unforgettable (Gooooooooooooooooooooal!) — more writing, editing and reading. Meanwhile I’m back up for air; feel free to be in touch.

The illegal American invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation was so epochal a catastrophe that it spawned a negative phrase in Arabic, “to Iraqize” or `arqana…So how can Libyans and the world avoid the Iraqization of Libya?

The News of the World debacle is a huge media story — and in typical fashion, our “Fair & Balanced” major news media organizations generally don’t know how to deal with it. Namely, by stating the facts. Such as:

“It seems increasingly likely that the techniques of bullying, coercion, spying, and the politics of personal destruction common at the News of the World were not limited to this one piece of the Murdoch media empire. Even short of hacking, Murdoch’s properties often behave like cults, not news organizations. We have known for a long time that Fox Cable News instructs reporters on how to spin the news and promotes fascist demagogues in the evening magazine shows.” — Professor Juan Cole at Informed Comment: “Is Murdoch’s Media Empire A Cult?”

Americans live in a late capitalist society where the rich have gotten many times richer and the middle class has gotten poorer, where Wall Street bankers have stolen us blind and blamed us for living above our means, where persistent unemployment is worse than in the Great Depression, where most politicians and some judges have been bought by corporations or special interests, where authorities actively conspire to keep people from voting, where the government spies on citizens assiduously without warrant or probable cause, and where the minds of the sheep are kept off their fleecing by substituting celebrity gossip, sex scandals, and half-disguised bigotry for genuine news…